World's greatest art galleries now on Google Street View

Gigapixel images of art from 17 top institutions go online at
googleartproject.com thanks to new Street View trolleys

Visits to the world’s most important museums are now available online, thanks to Google’s controversial Street View technology.

The search giant’s 360-degree cameras were allowed to tour the galleries of Tate Britain, the National Gallery and a host of other top museums and art institutions around the world. Previously, the cameras have been devoted to taking photographs of individual houses across the country for Google Maps.

The company says it will “enable people to discover and view 1,061 artworks online in extraordinary detail”. Visitors to googleartproject.com can zoom in to more than 1,000 works and see details that would be hard to make out in a gallery itself.

The 18-month project has seen 17 museums open 486 artists’ work to the web. Specially built camera trolleys have captured pictures that have been spliced together and will now allow virtual tours of individual galleries. They have also taken ultra-high resolution images of a limited number of artworks.

Dr Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery, said that “Viewers will see details and explore the painting in a way that hasn't been possible before.” He added that it would let “institutions work in partnership to reach out globally to new audiences”.

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Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate, said the project provided “a taste of the digital future for museums”.

The Uffizi, Hermitage and Museum of Modern Art are also among the institutions that have been involved with the googleartproject.com. Each of the museums has advised Google on choosing which collections to feature and the best angles from which to photograph work.

An information panel allows people to read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos. Users can also sae their own personalised selections and add comments that can be shared with selected other viewers.

Each of the 17 museums also selected one artwork to be photographed in ultra-high resolution ‘gigapixel’ photo capturing technology which will allow viewers to see brushwork and patina invisible to the naked eye. These include Van Googh’s Starry Night from New York and The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger from London’s National Gallery. Google says that it will reveal hard-to-see details such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger’s ‘The Merchant Georg Gisze’ or people hiding behind a tree in Ivanov’s ‘The Apparition of Christ to the People’.

Amit Sood, Head of the Art Project at Google, said the initiative began as a “20 per cent project”, in which the website’s staff are allowed to use one-fifth of their time to do projects purely because them find them interesting.

“Googlers passionate about making art more accessible online came together with our museum partners around the world and we have created what we hope will be a fascinating resource for art-lovers, students and casual museum goers alike”, said Mr Sood. He added that he hoped the new website would inspire people to “one day visit the real thing.”